Human Footprints On The Global Environmental Threats To Sustainability

Human Footprints on the Global
Environment
Threats to Sustainability
Edited by Eugene A. Rosa, Andreas Diekmann,
Thomas Dietz, and Carlo Jaeger
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Human footprints on the global environment : threats to sustainability /
edited by Eugene A. Rosa . . . [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01315-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-262-51299-2
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Environmental policyInternational cooperation.
2. Sustainable developmentInternational cooperation. I. Rosa, Eugene A.
GE170.H84 2010
363.7'0526dc22
2008054057
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1
Global Transformations: PaSSAGE to a
New Ecological Era
Eugene A. Rosa and Thomas Dietz
The magnitude of the threat to the ecosystem is linked to human population size
and resource use per person. Resource use, waste production and environmental
degradation are accelerated by population growth. They are further exacerbated
by consumption habits, certain technological developments and particular pat-
terns of social organization and resource management.
Joint Statement by Fifty-Eight of the Worlds Scientic Academies, New Delhi,
India, October 1993
Discovery of Global Scale and Environmental Change
Scale matters. The 1980s ended with an unprecedented awakening to the
global scale of environmental impacts, previously thought to be conned
to the local and regional levels. The awakening, underscored in the
epigram to this chapter, resulted in a conceptualization of environmental
threats worldwide, expressed in the universally accepted term global
environmental change (GEC). While GEC embeds many uncertainties,
one thing is absolutely certain: the magnitude of change is doubtlessly
due to the actions of the planets dominant species, Homo sapiens
sapiens; that is, to humans. Hence, an understanding of the causes of
GEC is a function of understanding the range of choices and actions
humans undertake.
This volume has two primary goals. The rst is to assess our state of
knowledge about the dynamics of coupled human and natural systems,
with an emphasis on their human dimensions. This goal is centered on
these questions: How and where has our understanding of the human
dimensions of the human-nature link advanced over the past two decades?
And what have been the key contributions from the social sciences in
pushing the frontiers of this understanding? The second goal aims to
bring into sharp relief not only the key gaps in our understanding, but
2 Eugene A. Rosa and Thomas Dietz
also the opportunities, challenges, and limitations for further advances
in knowledge. What are the promising routes to a higher ground of
knowledge about the role of human systems in the wide array of global
environmental processes? And what limitations are there in producing
such knowledge?
Dening Global Environmental Change (GEC)
Human societies are systems integrated with and dependent upon natural
ecosystems for sustenance and survival. Known to the ecological and
social sciences from their inception, this link has been brought center
stage by the many ostensible threats to ecosystems due to transforma-
tions of environments around the globe. Indeed, this indispensable link
has recently been given a rened conceptualization and a name: coupled
human and natural systems, or CHANS (Liu et al. 2007a, 2007b).
CHANS represents not only a coupling of the two systems, but also the
recognition that the two systems interact reciprocally and form complex
feedback loops (Liu et al. 2007a, 1513).
GEC is CHANS on growth hormones. In the past, and still in a few
places around the world that are in the process of vanishing, CHANS
were fairly isolated and, therefore, circumscribed dynamic systems. Band
and tribal societies often developed sustainable CHANS in isolation from
other human systems or intrusions. While lingering perhaps as a memory
of a rhapsodized past, such social systems no longer exist. There is liter-
ally no place on earth that is entirely isolated.
1
Neither nuclear clouds,
nor the warming of the planet, nor other ecological threats know geo-
graphic boundaries. The study of GEC is the study of CHANS in the
context of dynamic global processes.
The idea of GEC is generally agreed to consist of two complementary
dynamics: cumulative effects (that are local in domain but so widely
replicated that in sum they have global consequences) and systemic
effects (that occur on large spatial scales or alter the function of large
systems; Turner et al. 1990). Cumulative effects include tropical defore-
station, desertication, damaged local ecosystems, species losses, and
resource exhaustion, while systemic effects include ozone depletion
and global climate change. Both types of effects are traceable to human
activities.
The human dimensions of GEC raise the question of whether human
practices and institutions have seriously disrupted carbon, ocean, climate,
Global Transformations 3
biotic, and other biogeochemical cycles. If so, what are the specic
human drivers responsible for the disruptions? Which disruptions make
societies most vulnerable, and where? Have human practices, old and
new, led to species extinction, biodiversity loss, and overuse of natures
capital and services? What opportunities and strategies are available for
preempting, mitigating, or adapting to environmental changes at the
global levellarge or small?
An early marker of the awakening that environmental impacts were
global was the highly inuential report of the World Commission on
Environment and Development (WED), Our Common Future (WED
1987). Known as the Brundtland Report, after the commissions chair,
Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, the report sounded the alarm that
present global trends in resource use and environmental impacts could
not continue indenitely. They would need to be reversed. And, the
Brundtland Report further argued, many of the critical environmental
trends could not be solved within the connes of the nation-state
instead, they must be tackled from the vantage point of global coopera-
tion. The WEDs assessment of the state of the world was hardly
sanguine, but, nevertheless, the report ended on an optimistic, though
cautionary, note that centered on the idea of sustainability, of taking
actions to counteract the feedback from the reciprocal interaction of
CHANS that could dangerously reduce natures capital and services. The
WEDs creatively ambiguous denition of sustainable development read:
the ability of humankind . . . to ensure that it meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs.
Other indicators soon followed. Perhaps the most signicant were the
emergence of a variety of institutions devoted to global environmental
change, such as the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) in 1988 and the Human Dimensions Programme of GEC
in 1990 (becoming in 1996 the International Human Dimensions
Program); and the beginning of sustained attention by the U.S. National
Research Council/National Academy of Sciences (NRC/NAS) to the
human dimensions of GEC. The standing NRC/NAS Committee on the
Human Dimensions of Global Change published the germinal report
Global Environmental Change: Understanding the Human Dimensions
in 1992 (Stern, Young, and Druckman), referred to as the GEC92 here-
after.
2
This report codied and highlighted human dimensions as an
important and separate eld of study, provided an initial state-of-the-art
assessment of social scientic knowledge about global change, and
proposed an early research agenda for advancing the eld.
The foundation of GEC92 is consonant with the core idea of CHANS,
namely that human and environmental systems are inextricably con-
nected in webs of mutual causation. Because of this mutuality the range
of human responses to global change typically alter both kinds of
systemsfurther underscoring the pivotal importance of proximate
human drivers.
3
GEC92 also underscored the intersection of human with
physical and biological processes and of the need to understand how
they interact, often via complex feedback. That intersection recurs in two
conceptual locations. One is where proximate human (anthropogenic)
actions produce direct and relatively immediate environmental changes.
The other is where changes to physical and biological systems directly
and indirectly affect the natural capital and services that determine what
humans value and what they can do. The GEC92, a systematic review
of the literature existing then on the human driving forces, made it clear
that, despite the immense contributions of individual scholars, sustained
research traditions were difcult to nd. Since GEC92s publication, the
social science literature on GEC has grown in both volume and sophis-
tication, and is on the verge of becoming fully interdisciplinary and well
articulated.
Proximate Driving Forces
GEC92 distilled the key proximate anthropogenic drivers implicated in
global environmental change from a multilayered synthesis of the social
science literature. There were ve social variables identied as key human
forces: (1) population change, (2) economic growth, (3) technological
change, (4) political-economic institutions, and (5) attitudes and beliefs
(Stern, Young, and Druckman 1992, 75). This identication catalyzed
the course of social science research and, accordingly, directly shaped the
choice of topics we have covered in the chapters of this volume. It also
provides a baseline against which to measure the cumulative social
science knowledge of the past fteen years. Hence, the majority of sub-
stantive chapters in this volume are devoted to a state-of-the art assess-
ment of what scholars in the social sciences know about these drivers,
or what they need to learn. The chapters do not cover all these topics,
nor do they exhaust the subject matter relating to the included topics
indeed, they are not intended to do so. Rather, our volume has a more
rened scope, to present selected, vanguard exemplars of analyses of
those topics. The chapters, in our judgment, are representative of the
more mature lines of human dimensions research.
Missing from this volumeas it is more generally in analyses of global
changeis detailed coverage of the third social variable from our list of
ve drivers: technological change. It is omitted not because it lacks
importance, but because of the difculty of harnessing the complex and
proximate effects of technological change. On the one hand, this unmet
challenge is reected in the glacial growth in our understanding of
technologys role in GEC. That lacuna, in turn, accounts for its absence
from this volume. On the other hand, it simultaneously pinpoints one of
the most serious gaps in human dimensions research and the one, perhaps,
most desperately in need of concerted attention.
While the GEC92 provided a template for the topics covered in these
chapters, it is important to understand the geophysical and historical
context leading to that template, to understand what led us to the pro-
cesses it summarizes. Hence, in the remainder of this chapter we outline
key features of the linked human and natural systems of the earth that
illuminate the past and present role of human impacts on the planet. We
also situate the current state of anthropogenic forces on that system in
a larger context: that of an accelerated Pace, Scale, and global Spread of
environmental impacts driven by a process of Autocatalysis, Globaliza-
tion, and the interconnectedness of Ecosystems around the globe. The
acronym PaSSAGE provides a summary of these processes and an aid
to remembering them.
To begin, we sketch the long history that set the stage for these pro-
cesses. We then delineate the narrower context of contemporary global
processes sparked by human actions or impacting them.
The Biosphere
The biosphere is the global envelope of all life. The biosphere
4
comprises
not only the dynamics of large, linked physical processes such as the
carbon cycle, the hydrological cycle, short- and long-term atmospheric
dynamics, and geological change, but also the global ecosystem compris-
ing the dynamics of living systems of all the species of life on the planet.
It appears that earths evolutionary history has alternated between long
periods of relative balance among these dynamics followed by cataclys-
mic disruptions. In the modern era the biosphere is threatened with one
such major disruption. But unlike previous planetary catastrophes
excursions brought about by the impact of asteroids, changes in solar
radiation, or major geological disruptionsthe current one is due to an
entirely new force, the actions of the biospheres dominant species:
Homo sapiens sapiens. Humans are changing the global environment in
unprecedented ways.
Knowledge, Agency, and Uncertainty
All species are reliant on ecosystems. CHANS are uniquely different from
nonhuman ecosystems because of the self-referential capacity of humans:
the extensive ability to plan, organize, and create systematic solutions
to repeatable problemsto create institutions. Contemporary societies
have a unique advantage over their predecessors in that we have a rep-
ertoire of success and failures of past societies and, therefore, the oppor-
tunity to learn from them (Diamond 2005). The chapters in this volume
are intended not only to summarize key developments in global human
dimensions research, but also to underscore the many uncertainties that
remain to be addressed. One of the most compelling themes to have
emerged is the recognition that uncertainties about the human drivers of
GEC trump, by a considerable margin, the uncertainties in biophysical
processes. The greater uncertainties shrouding human ecosystems are a
function of two key factors: complexity and reexivity. Humans, more
than all other species, elaborate their ecosystems and act reexively
within them. What might be reasonable strategies for addressing these
uncertainties?
Then, of course, there is the even more intractable form of uncertainty:
meta-uncertainty. There are, no doubt, key factors for which our knowl-
edge is uncertain but we do not know how uncertain it is. In some cases
we may even be unaware that our knowledge of it is uncertain. Our hope
is that this volume not only will point to the direction for future research
on the human dimensions of CHANS, but also will become a foundation
for addressing this hierarchy of uncertainties.
The Context of Time: Its Arrow, Its Cycles
5
Cataclysmic disruptions to the entire planet are recorded in geologic
time. In contrast, human impacts are recorded in historical time. The
idea of historical time, the concept for interpreting human experience
through the fourth dimension favored for centuries in the West, captures
the unique irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events (Gould 1987,
194) experienced by the human species. Times arrow is the widely
adopted metaphor to capture the concept of this lens of retrospection.
But more than metaphor, times arrow also reects one of the universes
most basic processes and most basic markers of timethe law of entropy,
the relentless process toward disorder. The second law of thermodynam-
ics, the most ostensible manifestation of entropy, bears directly on the
sustainability of the principal sources of fuel available to humans around
the globe.
6
But the physical world does not follow unique and unidirectional time
sequences alone. It is also punctuated with repeatable and, to some
degree, predictable processes over time: times cycles. The cycles of time
are presumed to have no clear direction, no vector of progress. Ecosys-
tems, for example, are understood to reect the reasonable predictability
of dynamic cycles. Global environmental change can be understood as
the total collection of these evolutionary processes and cycles. Perhaps
more importantly, it can also be understood as the linking together of
countless CHANS around the globe into what might be called a mega-
CHANS. Similarly, GEC can be viewed as the extension of human
systems into an ever-widening natural systemnature in a global sense.
In perhaps the broadest way to frame it, GEC is borne of the interaction
and interpenetration of these two sequencesas the trajectory of times
arrow interacting with times cyclesand the consequences of this
coupling for ecological sustainability.
The principal driving forces of GEC, as noted, are the proximate
anthropogenic drivers reecting practices and institutions emerging from
times historical trajectory. A key challengeindeed, the challenge for
GECis whether these anthropogenic arrows have markedly disrupted
times cycles, and whether the entropic forces of human history have
disruptedperhaps irreversiblyglobal cycles.
As we will see, most work on CHANS has focused on the last half
century. It is during this period, sometimes called the Great Accelera-
tion, that many forms of environmental change became manifest and
tradethe ow of information, politics, and human migrationbecame
truly global. Of course, as the term acceleration implies, these processes
were under way well before the mid-twentieth century. But their pace
clearly intensied after World War II. This manifest global transforma-
tion in human and natural systems has prompted the research reviewed
in this volume. But while the majority of scholarship has focused on the
Great Acceleration, there is widespread acknowledgment that longer
time scales can provide essential insights into the large dynamics of
coupled human and natural systems at the global, regional, and local
levels. For example, the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth
project (Costanza, Graumlich, and Steffen 2007; http://www.aimes.ucar.
edu/activities/ihope.shtml) considers CHANS at scales of ten thousand,
one thousand, and one hundred years. Data are often much more sparse
at such longer scales than for inquiries focused on the more recent path.
But long time scales also may reveal dynamics that cannot be observed
with less diachronically extensive data. In the long run, better integration
of long-term extensive and short-term intensive analysis is bound to yield
powerful insights. For the moment, however, most research focuses on
the Great Acceleration and that is reected in this volume.
Scientic Worldview: Tipping the Balance of Nature
Examining CHANS on a global level, the focus of GEC, represents a
remarkable reinterpretation of one of sciences most deeply embedded
presuppositions, the rm belief in the balance of nature. For well over a
century one of the most pervasive and persistent scientic worldviews
presupposed nature to be in near-perfect balance, a balance virtually
impervious to internal and external disturbancesand certainly impervi-
ous to the actions of members of the puny hominid species we call
humans. For example, the gases that envelop the planet, warm its surface,
and protect it from harmful radiation were generally in balance in
between occasional excursions from one equilibrium to anotherthereby
exercising a moderating inuence that makes life possible on Earth (but
not on Earths closest neighbors, Mars and Venus).
Human disturbances to that balance were axiomatically dismissed in
the past as perturbations that were local in scope and transitory in time.
Humans had no measurable impacts on the larger dynamics or their
balance. In this worldview, times cycles could be read in the continuous
balance of nature. Times arrow could be read as transitory and circum-
scribed in its disturbances, not only insignicant in the larger picture of
the natural world, but also clear evidence that the natural balance always
prevailed (Weart 2003). In a sense, the cycles were epicycles in the grand
design and neither the cycles nor the arrow were susceptible to human
inuence in any consequential way.
This deeply held presupposition about the balance of nature provides
an engaging backdrop for understanding GEC. With that backdrop one
can view the scientic focus on GEC as a scientic mind shift, as a fun-
damental change in the overarching conceptualization of nature, as a
replacement of a dominant worldview with an entirely different one.
GEC, by replacing the worldview presupposing natural balance, under-
scores the recognition of disturbances to natures balance on a global
scale. Growing evidence shows that global physical cycles may no longer
be in the balance that has characterized them for the last dozen or so
millennia. The global CHANSthat is, the global hydrological, carbon,
climatic, and oceanographic cyclesare no longer seen as forces in equi-
librium but as systems disturbed by the overreaching of the human
species. Are such disturbances simply the circumscribed and localized
manifestations of times cycles on a larger scale? Growing evidence sug-
gests the answer to this question is no. Interestingly, the evidence
pointing toward that conclusion comes from a hybridization of the
scientic method.
Hybrid Scientic Method: Residual Framing and Inferences
The textbook ideal of scientic investigation that follows iteration
between theory development and experimentation to test theory is denied
to GEC research. The experimental method remains the gold standard
of scientic investigation; however, scientists cannot manipulate the
earth in its entirety.
7
Hence, the consistent and convergent indicators
showing that the global environment has been markedly altered, espe-
cially in recent centuries, provide an exemplary scientic puzzle that
raises the question: What is causing these changes? While the question
is endemic to science, the approach to answering it is not. It places before
us an asymmetrical scientic problem to which we can apply consider-
able knowledge about changes to the dependent variable (environmental
change), but remarkably meager knowledge about the independent vari-
ables (specic causes) producing those changes or their causal pathways.
While progress has been made over the past two decades in expanding
knowledge of both the dependent and independent variables, the gap
remains because progress has been uneven.
Physical science research addresses this limitation with an approach
that might be called residual framing and inference, which seeks to iden-
tify whether current geochemical and other cycles have deviated signi-
cantly from long-term global and geological cycles (presumed natural
patterns), and examines disruptive physical events such as volcanic
activity and changes in solar radiation. This approach then reasons that
residual or remaining differences between long-term and current patterns
must, therefore, be due to anthropogenic drivers, that is, to human
activities. Hence, the physical sciences have identied and are assessing
the variety of natural-cycle disruptions and discontinuous environmental
changes now occurring at a global level. To the extent these cycle disrup-
tions deviate signicantly from past patterns and where they cannot be
explained by changes in natural processes the disruptions provide
prima facie evidence that the chain of causal links leads back to human
activitiesto proximate anthropogenic drivers, to human activities as
the fundamental causes of environmental change at a global level. For
example, climate modelersliterally using some of the most powerful
computers in the worldare determining how much of the current
changes in the global climate are attributable to dynamic natural pro-
cesses and how much, through a process of inference from the residual
framing approach, is attributable to anthropogenic sources.
This inferential chain of reasoning has led to an epistemic agreement
among scientists that proximate anthropogenic drivers now either match
or surpass natural processes as the causal agents of environmental
changes across the planet. Humans appear to be disrupting global eco-
logical cycles in unprecedented ways. What are the human domains and
dynamics that are disrupting the replenishing cycles of nature? How do
these dynamics operate at a global level? The extensive record of human
history offers one tool for addressing these questions.
Archaeological Science: Nothing New?
Humans, even our protohuman predecessors, have transformed the
global environment since the beginnings of historical time.
8
Ecological
transformations across the planet have occurred in the pastand many
times. Hence, at rst blush the current dynamic of ecological change
due to human activity appears to be, literally, nothing new under the
sunor the other stars, or the planets, or the moon.
The question that naturally follows is: Are contemporary environmen-
tal dynamics merely an extension of past challenges? Or are they uniquely
more challenging, and if uniquely more challenging, do the lessons of
those bygone eras and the scientic tools at our disposal make us better
prepared to avoid the repeated ecological disasters of the past? Does the
available scientic evidence sustain the initial observation that humans
have disrupted the global environment in unprecedented ways?
Human impacts on ecosystems are a clearly documented feature of
prehistory.
9
For example, Central and South American rain forests show
evidence of human habitation as far back as ten thousand to twelve
thousand years ago (Rice 1996).
10
And evidence of disturbances to these
rain forests appears in Panama as early as eleven thousand years ago and
in Amazonia by eight thousand years ago (Roosevelt et al. 1996).
History provides additional supporting evidence. Ice core samples
from Greenland, at summit elevations of 3,200 meters above sea level,
have revealed the presence of serious air pollution in the ancient world
due to lead emissions. Lead production, owing to improvements in tech-
nology, became common around 3000 BC and then increased dramati-
cally as a byproduct from the making of silver coins in Greek and Roman
times, reaching eighty thousand metric tons per year about two thousand
years ago (Hong et al. 1994).
11
The plumes of lead emissions were appar-
ently carried thousands of miles across Europe and into the Atlantic by
circulation in the middle troposphere. Similarly, core samples of copper
concentrations, rst produced from native copper seven thousand years
ago, show heightened elevations of pollution from Roman and medieval
times, especially in Europe and China (Hong et al. 1996). Hence, long-
distance transport of air pollutants, a major issue in the early twentieth
century, is in fact a problem that is seven millennia old.
Perhaps the most dramatic and certainly most ironic historical example
of ecological collapse comes from the Fertile Crescent. This disaster was
dramatic because it occurred in a region of such favorable climatic and
biotic conditions (e.g., the crescent was once replete with forests) that it was
not only the site of the origins of agriculture, but also of civilization itself.
The collapse was ironic because the term Fertile Crescent is still used to
identify that region, when in fact its fertility has long been lost to history.
Accompanying the ecological collapse of the Fertile Crescent was the
collapse of the regions world cultural leadership as well as its millennia-
long lead over Europe in social organization and cultural sophistication.
Why then did the Fertile Crescent [currently the Mesopotamian marshlands in
Southern Iraq and extending into Iran, Syria, and Turkey] . . . lose [its] enormous
lead of thousands of years to late-starting Europe? The major factor behind these
shifts becomes obvious as soon as one compares the modern Fertile Crescent
with ancient descriptions of it. Today, the expression Fertile Crescent and
world leader in food production are absurd. Large areas of the former Fertile
Crescent are now desert, semidesert, steppe, or heavily eroded or salinized terrain
unsuited for agriculture.
12
. . . [The] Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean
societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They
committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base. (Diamond
1997, 410411; emphasis added)
Hence, human history repeatedly has seen periods when ecological
conditions presaged the coming and going of particular civilizations. But
it has witnessed no era where the human species (Homo sapiens sapiens)
was threatened in toto, where the human race itself was threatened with
extinction due to a global overexploitation of ecological resources.
The pattern of ecological collapse has repeated itself many times in
the prehistoric and historic past. Archaeologist Charles Redman, from
his examination of a variety of archaeological case studies
13
around the
globe, summarizes the fundamental causal process of these collapses:
This seemingly self-destruction [of environments] occurs repeatedly
individuals, groups, and entire societies make decisions that are initially
productive and logical, but over time have negative and sometimes
disastrous environmental implications (1999, 1314).
This record of past disasters is, nevertheless, partly counterbalanced
by past success stories where societies managed to address environmen-
tal challenges and exist for lengthy periods of time. And societal successes
can be found across diverse environments from ninth-century New
Guinea, to sixteenth-century Germany, to seventeenth-century Shogun
Japan (Costanza, Graumlich, and Steffen 2007; Diamond 2005).
Can contemporary societies take ecological lessons from past
societiesfrom those that failed as well as those that succeeded? Are
modern societies little more than a fast-forward of ancient societies?
If so, is it the successful societies they emulate in an accelerated mode?
Or are they emulating collapsed societies? Are modern societies, by using
natures capital faster than it can be replenished, exceeding their carrying
capacities, placing them on the road to overshoot carrying capacity
and perhaps even to ecological disaster? If such disasters are a feature
of the global future will they occur everywhere and at the same pace?
Smooth Transition or Sharp Break?
A key aspect in the answers to these questions lies in one dening distinc-
tion between human systems and those of all other species. Humans are
more effective than other species as ecosystem shapers than as ecosystem
adaptors. Hence, they have ultimately modied their environments more
than have any other of the planets creatures. The modern era, on the
one hand, doubtlessly represents an extension of the evolutionary process
of cyclical adaptation. On the other hand, it may mark an unequivocal
break with the pasta passing of history into a new ecological era. The
dynamics of contemporary CHANS, highlighting humans as ecosystem
shapers and ecosystem adaptors, reilluminates the central question of
GEC: to what extent has times arrow so penetrated times cycles that
the dynamics of both are threatened, thereby threatening the sustain-
ability of the biosphere for contemporary societies?
A New Era, a New Identity?
The marked global increase in key environmental consequences has, for
a number of careful observers, signaled a sharp break with the past. This,
in turn, has led some distinguished scholars to give special designations
to the human species and to this new ecological era. Each designation is
driven by the observation that global environmental changes threaten
the carrying capacity of the planet, meaning, the number of people Earth
can support.
14
Distinguished sociologist and human ecologist William
Catton (1980) was one of the rst to warn of this break. Wishing to
highlight the magnitude of human threats to global carrying capacity,
Catton (1987) designated humankind as Homo colossus whose diverse
and excessive appetites make it the worlds most polymorphous species.
And it is this species voraciousness that portends the overshooting of
the global ecological system.
15
Similarly, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen
16
and ecologist Eugene Sto-
ermer (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) have redened the term Anthropo-
cene to describe the period that began roughly at the time James Watt
perfected the steam engine in the latter part of the eighteenth century
and continues today.
17
The renement by Crutzen and Stoermer empha-
sizes the impacts on the environment of industrialization and moderniza-
tion. This telescoping of the modern era, this alignment with the age of
modernity, underscores the astounding increase in the pace of anthropo-
genic exploitation of the earths resources over the past three centuries.
Global Processes: AGE Drives GEC
Three fundamental, large, pervasive processes are driving GEC: autoca-
talysis (A), globalization (G), and the interconnectedness of ecosystems
(E), of CHANS, around the globeAGE for short.
Autocatalysis
Historical precedent offers at least one conceptual tool for understanding
the predicament of modern societies: autocatalysis. From the beginning
of human history, many of the fundamental changes impacting the envi-
ronment have followed an autocatalytic processone that catalyzes
itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has
started (Diamond 1997, 111). For example, in ancient civilizations
intensied food production, the development of occupational specializa-
tions, and the emergence of societal complexity stimulated each other
through this autocatalytic process. Large populations, specialized and
better organized, could further intensify food production and exploit
other resources leading to even larger populations, new specializations,
and new forms of resource exploitation.
This historical process not only extends into the modern age, it is a
principal cause of GEC. Ecologically, autocatalysis is a dynamic process
of accelerated, cumulative ecological impacts. The unavoidable and
sobering fact is that such a process cannot continue indenitely. Yet
modern societies, by accelerating the pace of autocatalysis (through the
ve social variables, or driving forces, noted earlier), are de facto ignoring
this reality and producing a considerable threat to their sustainability.
Globalization
The world is undergoing one of the most profound social and political
changes ever to have occurred: globalization.
18
The term globalization,
the worldwide spread of communication and commerce, of interpene-
trating networks of production processes, risks, and ecosystems, and the
emergence of new international challenges and regimes attracts a variety
of denitions. Among these, Held and colleagues provide a characteristic
and insightful one describing globalization as the widening, deepening,
and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of
contemporary social life (1999, 2). While the idea of globalization
is grounded in economic, social, and political processes, its main fea-
tureswidening, deepening and speeding upmean the increased spread,
scale, and pace of global ecological processes. Globalization also means,
as previously noted, the interpenetration of CHANS near and far, result-
ing in a mega-CHANS. In short, globalization underscores basic trans-
formations on a global scale manifest in the speed of transactions, their
extensive and broad reach, and the deepening patterns of their ecological
interconnectedness.
A Global CHANS
Ecological interconnectedness, the third process of GEC, comprises eco-
logical connections and interdependencies on a global scale. Ostensible
features of this process are the worldwide extraction and distribution of
natures capital, the use of natures services over broad reaches, as well
as the worldwide distribution of labor. One consequence of globally
linked CHANS is that ecological problems in one part of the world have
the potential to affect many other parts. One publicized example of the
ecological consequences in one part of the world due to resource demand
in another part is the so-called hamburger connection. It is claimed that
nearly 40 percent of the forest cover in Central America has been
destroyed to make room for the pasture needed to raise beef cattle for
North Americas fast-food industry (Myers 1981).
Global Dynamics: Outcomes of AGE
The three AGE processes have led to the ecological outcomes that dene
GEC. In particular, autocatalysis, globalization, and ecological inter-
connectedness have, as noted, led to an accelerated pace of the global
ecological metabolism, an increased scale of ecological impact, and the
global spread of impacts, or PaSS for short. Combined with AGE, the
acronym becomes the PaSSAGE described earlier.
The pace of ecological metabolism refers to the acceleration in the rate
of demand on natures capital and services and to the marked rate of
increase in human-generated environmental impact, referred to as the
Great Acceleration (Hibbard et al. 2007). The historical pace of evolu-
tionary processes is being superseded even in the most remote parts of
the globe by a dynamic comprising systems of rapidly changing variables
that may be approaching thresholds where the magnitude of their effects
shift, all driven by human action that continues to accelerate with ever
more profound effects.
Scale refers to demonstrable, often dramatic increases in the magnitude
of the drivers of ecological impacts or in the impacts themselves. Cor-
responding to the systemic domain of GEC, as described previously, they
are processes that occur on large spatial scales or alter the function of
large systems.
The term spread refers to growth in the size of the distributional
demands for natures capital and services and to the growth in the
distribution of environmental impacts, such as the global transfer
of environmental degradation or diseases. Corresponding to the
cumulative-effects domain of GEC, similarly described, many activities
are already global in spread.
PaSSAGE
There is little question that the processes driving GEC (AGE: auto-
catalysis, globalization, and ecological interdependency), its overall
dynamic, and each element of outcome (PaSS: pace, scale, and spread)
sets todays global ecological challenges apart from all past challenges.
The pace of past environmental changetimes arrowwas glacial and
the scale and spread of ecosystem impactstimes cycleswere local or
regional in scope. In the past few centuries how things have changed.
19
It is important to underscore a crucial point that may be obvious, but
whose importance cannot be diminished with overstatement. Neither
GECs elements of autocatalysis, globalization, and ecological inter-
dependency nor their global outcomes of pace, scale, and spread are
entirely independent of one another. Nor do either the elements or the
outcomes always follow patterns of linear, temporal inuence. Rather,
many interpenetrate in dynamic and synergistic ways, some of which
impact sustainability positively, others negatively.
Our outline of the conceptual and denitional features of GEC pace,
scale, and spread provide the abstractness and generalization necessary
to illuminate the discussion of anthropogenic drivers. But understanding
their operation and effectiveness requires concrete examples for each
GEC outcome.
Pace
Three quantitative indicators reafrming the accelerated pace of eco-
logical change are the rates of atmospheric CO
2
concentration (currently
35 percent above that in 1750, the beginning of the industrial age) and
climate change, the rapid increase in the human population, and the rate
of species extinction.
20
While these three indicators paint a far from
complete picture of the accelerated pace of change, their availability and
quantication provide an exemplary sketch.
CO
2
Concentrations No one doubts the importance of climatic condi-
tions in shaping the possibilities of what humans could and did do on
earth (Rosa and Dietz 1998). The various ice ages are a blunt testament
to those connections. So, too, are the ecological adaptations of native
cultures around the globe. For the vast expanse of human history, over
thousands of years, the concentrations of several trace gases critical to
shaping the earths climatecarbon dioxide (CO
2
), methane (CH
4
), and
nitrogen oxides (NOx)have remained fairly stable.
Then, beginning in the late eighteenth century,
21
atmospheric concen-
trations of these gases began to increase rapidly, reaching todays 35-
percent-larger concentration. The coincidence of gas concentrations and
the rapid expansion of industrial activitiesdependent, as they were, on
unprecedented amounts of fossil fuelsprovide the obvious and widely
accepted hypothesis that human activities had, for the rst time, dis-
turbed the approximate equilibrium of the earths basic cycles. Times
arrow, due to the entropic increases from the burning of fossil fuels,
impacted the slow cycle of fossil fuel creation and accumulation. Perhaps
this well-documented spike upward in the concentrations of greenhouse
gases is the most apparent indicator of the vast spread of environmental
impact, the globalization of threats to CHANS.
Climate Change The accelerated pace of cumulating CO
2
, the principal
greenhouse gas, may be partly revealed in the most recent estimates of
global climate change. The trend in global temperature over the past
eighteen thousand years is estimated to be an increase of about 5C
(9F)
22
with estimates of a much greater warming, perhaps 10C, 20C,
or 30C at higher altitudes. The twentieth century alone accounts for a
land-area warming of 0.74 0.18 degrees Celsius (IPCC 2007). Thus,
while it took eighteen millennia to produce the 5C warming, a sizable
proportion of it came in the last century alone. Since the beginning of
the industrial era, emissions have accounted for ve times the change in
climate due to solar variation (IPCC 2007). Projections suggest that
future warming from greenhouse gases may occur at an even faster pace.
For example, it is expected that the climate will warm by an average of
3C (between 1.7C and 4.0C) by the end of this century. The pace of
warming trends is as worrisome as their magnitude, since a quickened
pace produces effects that are less predictable and more pronounced and
for which adaptation is constrained.
Population Growth As of this writing, there are 6.8 billion people on
Earth (United Nations 2005). It took many millennia, until around 1810,
for the world population to reach one billion persons. It then took only
just over a century to add another billion to the total, only three and a
half decades to add a third billion, only a decade and a half to add a
fourth, a mere thirteen years to add a fth, and then twelve years to add
the sixth billion in 2000 (the shortest amount of time to add a billion in
human history). It is anticipated that world population will reach seven
billion by about 2015, taking fteen years to add the most recent billion,
indicative of a gradual reduction in the pace of growth. Nonetheless,
population is expected to continue to grow, reaching between eight and
eleven billion by 2050. For the vast majority of human history, the world
population grew relatively slowly. In the modern era it grew exponen-
tially. Indeed, the world added an astounding 4.4 billion persons in the
twentieth century alone.
UN projections, based upon a median fertility scenario, expect that
world population will stabilize sometime after 2200 at ten billion
personsa more than 50 percent increase over the current population
size. Hence, while the human population is expected to grow in the
twenty-rst century at a considerably slower pace than it did in the
twentieth, the total number of people placing demands on environmen-
tal capital and services will be of unprecedented scale and, consequently,
will present an unprecedented assault on global ecosystems.
While the growth rate of the human population is slowing and expected
to stabilize, the declining size of households and the subsequent growth
in their number continues at a rapid pace (Liu et al. 2003). The increase
in households typically manifests itself in urban sprawl (a serious threat
to biodiversity conservation) and places increased demands on infra-
structure needs. The decline in the size of households also represents a
signicant increase in the consumption of resources. Along with the scale
of the global population, these trends raise the question of whether there
will be sufcient resources to satisfy the growing demands they embed.
Species Extinction The vast majority of species that have ever walked
the earth are extinct. The bulk of these extinctions, however, are due to
either astronomical or terrestrial cataclysms in geological history or to
slow rates of extinction through evolutionary processes. In modern times
the rates of extinction are extraordinarily faster, for some species groups
one thousand to ten thousand times the evolutionary rate of extinction
that existed prior to the appearance of the human species. It is estimated
that as many as 137 species disappear each day, amounting to over fty
thousand species each year (Raven and McNeely 1998; Dowdeswell and
Heywood 1995; Wilson 1992).
These dramatic rates of species extinction are a serious challenge to
ecological sustainability because they represent disturbing assaults to
symbiotic relationships among species and to complex species interde-
pendencies, including the dependence of CHANS on the many ecosys-
tem goods and services provided or enhanced by plant and animal
species. Indeed, species extinction may be the most ostensible evidence
of times arrow disrupting times cycles. And the primary cause of this
accelerated pace is clearhabitat destruction by expanded land use, by
the introduction of exotic species into ecosystems, by overexploitation
of some species for commercial purposes, and, in some places, by pollu-
tion. In the future, it is expected that climate change will also be a
major contributor.
Much of this change has occurred over the last half century. As the
UNs recent Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (see table 1.1) puts it:
The structure and functioning of the worlds ecosystems changed more rapidly
in the second half of the twentieth century than at any time in human history.
More land was converted to cropland in the 30 years since 1950 than in the 150
years between 1700 and 1850. Cultivated systems (areas where at least 30
percent of the landscape is in croplands, shifting cultivation, conned livestock
production, or freshwater aquaculture) now cover one quarter of earths
terrestrial surface. (UNEP 2005a, 2)
23
Scale
What about scale consequences? In pioneering research, Vitousek and
colleagues (1997) carefully estimated the scale of ecosystem impacts
around the globe by examining the dominant inuence of human actions
in producing those impacts. As for the accuracy of their estimates of
scale, the authors write: The numbers have large uncertainties, but the
fact that they are large is not at all uncertain (1997, 495). Figure 1.1
summarizes their ndings.
Land Use Land use and its transformations represent the single most
inuential human impact worldwide and is the primary driving force in
the loss of biodiversity. Between one-third and one-half of the global
land surface has been altered by humans. Other key transformations
include the growing percentage of fully exploited marine sheries (includ-
ing the 22 percent of sheries already overexploited or depleted), the 35
percent increase in CO
2
concentrations compared to the preindustrial era,
and the use of more than half of all accessible surface fresh water.
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Other examples abound. Since 1700, the actions of humans have
converted 19 percent of the worlds forests and woodlands to cropland
and pasture, resulting in a sizable redistribution of land uses across the
globe (Richards 1990). This recent historical shift alone triggered not
only changes in land uses, but also changes in biogeochemical cycles
including hydrological cycles as well as in ecosystemsin short, changes
in the earth system itself.
Spread
Energy Consumption Three centuries ago nations in the West started
an industrial revolution that continues to spread around the globe. The
fundamental practice launching the revolution was the shift in reliance
from direct use of solar energy, burning of wood hydrocarbons, and
direct use of photosynthetic energy xation to a reliance on fossil hydro-
carbons. In essence, the industrial revolution was a revolution in the use
of fossil fuels that created a deep dependence on that form of energy
a dependence that remains unabated. The global use of fuel hydrocar-
bons has increased nearly 800-fold since 1750 and about 12-fold in the
Figure 1.1
Human dominance or alteration of several major components of the Earth
system, expressed as (from left to right) percentage of the land surface trans-
formed; percentage of the current atmospheric CO
2
concentration that results
from human action; percentage of accessible surface freshwater used; percentage
of terrestrial nitrogen xation that is human-caused; percentage of plant species
in Canada that humanity has introduced from elsewhere; percentage of bird
species on Earth that have become extinct in the past two millennia, almost all
of them as a consequence of human activity; and percentage of major marine
sheries that are fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted.
Source: Vitousak et al. 1997, 495, reproduced with permission.
100
80
60
40
20
0
P
e
r
c
e
n
t
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g
e
Land
transformation CO
2
concentration
Water
use Nitrogen
fixation
Plant
invasion Bird
extinction
Marine
fisheries
twentieth century alone (Hall et al. 2003, 318). And the use of fossil
fuels has spread everywhere. The leading form of fossil fuel, oil, is con-
sumed by literally every nation (nearly two hundred in total) around the
globe (Hall et al. 2003) and in nearly every nation, demand for fossil
fuels is growing, quite rapidly in many cases.
The continued high levels of fossil fuel consumption and increased
global demand threaten natures capital in a variety of signicant ways.
Consumption reduces the availability of this resource for future genera-
tions (by how much is a hotly debated issue), markedly contributes to
global climate change, and is responsible for smog and particulates as
well as toxic substances that are harmful to health.
Deforestation One of the most obvious spreads of ecological impact
around the globe is the loss of forest cover. Deforestation, once virtually
concentrated in the temperate zones, has now reached all climatic zones,
especially the Southwhich contains 77 percent of the New Worlds
tropical forests (Rudel 1989). Globally, the 3.4 billion hectares (a
hectare equals approximately 2.41 acres) of forestland that existed in
1980 had declined by 5 percent to 3.2 billion hectares just fteen years
later (FAO 1997).
The spread of deforesting practices is especially pronounced in the
tropics where, for example, the amount of deforested land increased
from 7.5 million hectares per year

in 1979 to 13.2 million hectares

in
1991, an increase of over 75 percent or an annual increase of 4.5 percent
per year (Bawa and Dayanandan 1997). Worldwide, tropical forests
are being lost at a rate of 14 to 16 million hectares per year. Examples
of the most rapid spread of tropical deforestation include Brazil,
where the Amazon region alone contains 40 percent of the worlds
remaining tropical rain forest. Over the last twenty-ve years, Brazil
has lost forest cover equivalent to the size of Germany (Mertens et al.
2002).
Closed-canopy forests (unbroken forests consisting of virgin, old-
growth, and naturally regenerated woodlands) are especially valuable in
countering soil erosion, desertication, and the impacts of climate change.
The remaining closed-canopy forests are concentrated in only fteen
countries, nearly all in the South, making them especially vulnerable to
population and development pressures (UNEP 2001).
To deforestation can be added the spread of other impacts: desertica-
tion (the conversion of arable land into desert-like conditions), soil
erosion (the decline in the fertility, depth, and structure of arable land),
and salinization (where water tables rise close to the surface, water
evaporates, leaving a salty residue in the soil; cf. Harrison 1993).
Urban Sprawl One of the key factors that accounts for the spread of
deforested areasas well as species loss, other forms of land degrada-
tion, and the destruction of coastal zonesis another form of spread:
urban sprawl (Ewing et al. 2005).
24
The growing concentration of the
human population into urban areas accompanied by the rise of megaci-
ties (cities with populations over ten million) is a long-standing, persis-
tent demographic trajectory that is expected to continue indenitely
(United Nations 2004). Three and a half billion people now live in urban
areas, over one-half of the entire human population as of mid-2007
(Wimberley and Kulikowski 2007), and will increase to over two-thirds
of the population by 2030. The continued expansion of urban housing
and infrastructure into open areas comes at the expense not only of their
material requirements, but also of other forms of natural capital, includ-
ing forest cover, and the species that are dependent upon them.
Chemicals Everywhere Remarkably enough, as noted, traces of lead and
copper were discovered in Greenland that could be tracked to the golden
ages of Greece and Rome and to the Northern Sung dynasty of China
(tenth to twelfth century). In modern times, the problem of chemical pollu-
tion in this remote place not only persists but also is markedly worse. Body
burdens (measurable amounts of chemicals in the body) of two hundred
hazardous compounds have been found among the ninety thousand Inuit
natives who occupy Eastern Canada and Greenland. These compounds
are implicated in birth defects, lowered intelligence, and a wide variety of
other health problems. Samples of the breast milk of mothers reveal PCBs
(Polychlorinated biphenyls) and levels of mercury twenty to fty times
higher than levels found in the urban areas of the United States. Further-
more, the ame-retardant chemical PBDEs (Polybrominated diphenyl
ethers) have been found in Inuit blood (Courtney et al. 2000).
Other evidence also indicates that chemicals have spread far and wide.
A number of modern chemical marvels, taken for granted by countless
users around the globe, were developed from several types of peruoro-
nated compounds, such as peruorooctane sulfate (PFOS) and peruo-
rooctanoic acid (PFOA). Known by such brand names as Teon,
Scotchgard,
25
Stainmaster, and Gore-Tex, these chemicals have been
detected around the globeliterally. They have been found in polar
bears roaming the Arctic Circle, in dolphins swimming in the Mediter-
ranean Sea off the coast of Italy, and in gulls ying above Tokyo. Fur-
thermore, they have been detected in the Great Lakes, the source of
drinking water for nearly forty million U.S. residents. Peruoronated
compounds have been linked to cancer, development problems, liver
damage, and other health problems in a number of animal studies as
well as studies showing more direct implications in the health of humans
(cf. Alexander et al. 2003; Butenhoff et al. 2002; Ciriolo et al. 1982;
Kliewer, Lehmann, and Wilson 1999; Kroll et al. 2000).
The Spread of Germs One of the subtler, but potentially more devastat-
ing consequences of GEC is its impacts on human well-being. Climate
change, for example, is very likely to increase the incidence and the
spread of disease. Throughout history diseases have been the biggest
killers of people, [and therefore] have also been decisive shapers of
history (Diamond 1997, 197).
Recent history recapitulatesin fast-forward timethis recurrent
feature of all of human history. There is clear evidence that the increased
warmth and dryness of a recent ENSO (El Nio Southern Oscillation)
season led to vegetation growth that sustains desert rodents. This
prompted not only a growth in the rodent populations, carriers of the
Hantavirus, but also a spread of rodents into human habitats. The net
effect was an outbreak of an acute respiratory disease with a high death
rate (the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome) among humans (CCSP 2003).
It is reasonable to suspect parallel processes with global warming. For
example, a receding of permafrost and snowcaps will likely expand the
area of mosquito breeding, which will result in the spread of mosquito-
borne diseases including malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, as well as
viruses (various types of encephalitis, West Nile virus, and others).
The fast-forward of modern disease, exhibiting all the features of
PaSSAGE, shows itself in the rate and consequences of disease spread:
the pace of transmission is much faster, the numbers of those exposed
is much greater (a vast increase in scale), and due to the variety and ease
of international travel the expanse of exposure is much higher (a vast
increase in spread). There is a very real potential for climate change to
cause ecological changes that can be costly not only to human health,
but also to human wealth and quality of life. Extreme events can have
ripple effects that disrupt economies, communities, agricultural produc-
tion, trade, tourism, and even the social fabric itself.
A variety of ostensible global impacts is traceable to the processes of
GEC, a combination of pace, scale, and spread. What are the drivers
of those processes?
Humans as Shapers of Environment and History
Jared Diamond summarizes his inuential examination of the entire
history of the human species succinctly: Environment molds history
(1997, 352). Few would disagree. But to complete the causal chain, we
need to add that humans mold environments. And the residual framing
approach of scientic evidence has clearly demonstrated that CHANS
and the global environment are being molded in unprecedented ways.
CHANS are Janus-like. They are reciprocal, feedback systems where,
on the one hand, human practices and institutions determine the avail-
ability of natural capital and services to sustain human populations. But
on the other hand, the resulting changed ecosystems determine the
range of options and institutions available to humankind. CHANS are
dynamic, serving as both the medium and outcome of human actions
planned and unplanned. Put more succinctly, humans shape the natural
ecosystems that support life but are also, in turn, shaped by those
ecosystems.
Proximate Anthropogenic Drivers
The National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences report
GEC92 (Stern, Young, and Druckman 1992) summarized the epistemic
agreement over the probable proximate anthropogenic (or human)
drivers of GEC. That scientic consensus has provided the useful check-
list of factors that guided the selection of chapters in this volume:
population, afuence and consumption (especially of energy and mate-
rials), technological change, changes in land cover and land use, insti-
tutional actions and responses, and culture. Recurrently, population
dynamics and environmentally signicant consumption, combined with
direct modications of natural systems, account for the vast majority
of effects on the global environment that are traceable to human activ-
ities (Dietz, Rosa, and York 2007; Rosa, York, and Dietz 2004; York,
Rosa, and Dietz 2003a, 2003b). What follows is a sketch of the dynam-
ics of these dominating forces driving GEC: population, consumption,
and technological efciency.
Population Human populationall its dynamicsis one of the most
direct and enduring forces behind land use change, energy use, and basic
levels of consumptionplacing increased demands on living space, food
production, water use, and the ora and fauna of the planet. It has been
so since the early beginnings of the human species. Archaeologist Charles
Redman observed that, in every case study, in his book of the human
impacts on ancient environments, the growing number of people is a
factor creating an imbalance between society and the environment
(1999, 164).
Consumption There is little doubt (Dietz, Rosa, and York 2007; Rosa,
York, and Dietz 2004; York, Rosa, and Dietz 2003a) that consumption
is a key driver of environmental degradation, and that the patterns of
consumption represent a sword that cuts in two directions. On the one
hand, the economic fruits of modernity mean that a growing share of
the worlds population can look forward to material and social comforts
that have historically eluded them. And improvements in sanitation,
health, and educationindicators of virtually all denitions of social
progressmean that a larger share of the worlds population enjoys
a quality of life unreachable only a generation ago.
On the other hand, these improvements come with an environmental
cost. In the short run, reductions in mortality lead to increased popula-
tion growth, the key driver of impacts. Over the longer term, improve-
ments in health, education, and opportunities fuel demographic transitions
that result in slowdowns in population growth. But the increase in lon-
gevity is ineluctably an increase in the number of years individuals con-
tinue to consumeadding further to aggregate consumption, despite the
decline in the rate of consumption growth as a population moves toward
stabilization.
During the modern era the industrial nations were the primary bene-
factors of increased consumption and were the primary producers of
many environmental impacts. In this era of high modernization, other
nations, such as China and India, are experiencing rapid economic
growth, catapulting them abruptly into the high-consumption club. As
we already noted, the pace of population growth is slowing, meaning
that it will eventually peak. Nevertheless, the level of that peak will
reach heights unknown to history. The slowed rate of population growth
could ultimately mean reduced stress to the environment. However,
such reduction could be counterbalanced or, worse, trumped by the
rapid growth in consumption associated with the emergence of a global
middle class (Myers and Kent 2003). Perhaps there is no better example
of this than China.
China While having reduced its rate of population growth dramati-
cally, China continues to be the most populous nation on earth.
26
It also
has one of the fastest growing economies. As a result, more and more
of the 1.3 billion Chinese can afford to purchase a wider array of goods.
In 2003, China consumed one-half of the worlds cement production,
one-third of its steel, nearly one-fourth of its copper, and nearly one-fth
of its aluminum. Traditionally a large exporter of coal, China is now
consuming almost all of its production while simultaneously becoming
the second-largest importer of oil after the United States (Goodman
2004). And China, the fastest-growing car market in the world with
purchases of 4.4 million vehicles in 2002, has replaced Germany as
the third largest automobile market in the world, ranking only behind
the United States and Japan (Eisenstein 2004).
What is perhaps most troubling about Chinas new wealth is that its
rapid growth in consumption may be the harbinger of what could follow
among the other poorer countries of the world (e.g., India) that are now
experiencing increased economic prosperity. Indeed, the Chinese may be
the paradigmatic example of what Myers and Kent (2004) refer to as
the new consumers, the rising tide of people around the world with
growing incomes to satisfy their pent-up demand for goods. While there
are many uncertainties over the magnitude of stress this sort of rising
consumption will place on ecosystems, that there will be signicant stress
is entirely certain.
Technological Efciency As economies mature, their structures undergo
transformation. A number of observers (Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000;
Grossman and Kruger 1995; Graedel and Allenby 1995) believe that
changes in the structure of advanced economies will result in reduced
impacts to the environment. One of the features of the most advanced
economies is a decline in the extractive and manufacturing sectors, whose
dominance is replaced by a rapidly growing service sector. Owing to this
shift, some observers anticipate a demonstrable decline in the envi-
ronmental impacts of mature economies despite continued economic
growth.
Electronic Age That expectation is challenged on several grounds. One
such challenge comes from the growth in the personal computer market.
The most signicant technological change enabling and supporting a
service economy is the personal computer, whose unit sales totaled one
billion (nearly one computer for every six people in the world) by the
end of 2002 (Kuehr and Williams 2003). But, contrary to expectation,
computers seriously impact the environment. The manufacture of each
computer requires an astounding amount of energy and materials. One
desktop computer and monitor, averaging fty-three pounds, requires
at least ten times its weight in fossil fuels and chemicals, making it
more materials intensive than an automobile or refrigerator
27
(Kuehr
and Williams 2003).
The materials burden of the desktop computer is magnied by the facts
that computers have a short lifespan and that many of the chemicals in
their manufacture, such as lead, are toxic. Many of these toxic chemicals
pose serious risks not only during their manufacturing stage, but also
when they are discarded. And contrary to optimistic predictions of
paperless ofces a few decades ago, personal computers have led to
a marked increase in paper consumption (Senior 2007).
The examples reviewed here are merely the pixels of a much larger
picture. What are the contours of that picture?
Human Dimensions of GEC: The Big Picture
Human dimensions of GEC are a conceptual framing of global CHANS
that produces questions about the role of humans in ecological change
on a global scale. As noted, there has been a scientic consensus for
over two decades about the probable anthropogenic drivers or human
factors that account for global environmental change. Given that long-
standing consensus, it becomes appropriate to ask: what is our state of
knowledge about the human dimensions of GEC? Over the last decade
or so, major international research programs have greatly enhanced our
understanding of global CHANS.
For the rst time, it is realistic to speak of a science of sustainability
that is devoted to coupled human-environment systems (Clark 2007)
or CHANS, with their dominance by human dimensions. One of the
clearest indicators of the institutionalization process was the decision by
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to devote a section of its presti-
gious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, to
sustainability science (Clark 2007). Another prestigious scientic society,
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, established a
resource website on sustainability that highlights research and programs
investigating CHANS (http://sustainabilityscience.org).
GEC, the global context of CHANS, has generated formally organized
and coordinated research programs, mostly through the International
Human Dimensions Programme (http://www.ihdp.org/). Other research
programs were the spontaneous convergence of researchers scattered
about the globe addressing common intellectual themes. Still other
research represents a refocusing of traditional disciplinary interests on
GEC topics. In this volume, we offer a carefully selected sample of state
of the science reviews of these these major research efforts.
The remaining chapters are devoted to some but not all of the consen-
sual themes of GECs human dimensions: population, consumption, land
cover and land use, institutional actions, and culture. The chapters
provide a broad, exemplary picture of these themes while also summariz-
ing our cumulative understanding of this complex topic, offering an
unprecedented vantage point for understanding CHANS and how they
are networked and interrelated globally.
We have not attempted to assemble examples of all types of human
dimensions research. Our goal, instead, has been to be simultaneously
more modest, by limiting the breadth of coverage, and more ambitious,
by bringing the greater depth of well-developed, illustrative works to the
attention of the larger scientic and policy audiences. These works exem-
plify core issues addressed by interdisciplinary research that combines
social science and ecology.
The authors in this volume do not always speak exactly the same
language, or always share assumptions about the dynamics of the human
dimensions of GEC, or hold the same opinions of which methods are
most appropriate for understanding global CHANS. But aligning rather
than ignoring the disparate approaches is exactly the goal of the volume.
GEC work in the physical and biological sciences has been an enterprise
of a truly global community, as it must be to study worldwide phenom-
ena. We believe the same is true for the social sciences. To understand
the human dimensions of global environmental change requires a
framing that brings the various traditions together so that currently
disparate approaches can be forged into a common language to ensure
an authentic global effort.
In examining approaches to understanding CHANS, we nd a strong
divide between the Continental and North American research traditions
in the social sciences. Rather than ignore this work, or represent only
one side of this divide exclusively, as is often done, we include two
chapters that combine the two traditions (chapter 6 by McCay and
Jentoff and chapter 7 by Kasperson, Kasperson, and Turner) and one
exemplar of the Continental tradition (chapter 2 by Beck). Our inten-
tions are to inform readers and begin facilitating communication between
traditions that normally do not talk to one another and to promote
research that becomes more synthetic and richer than would otherwise
be the case.
Galison (1997), a distinguished historian of science, notes that even
in as seemingly narrow a eld as high-energy physics, researchers from
different disciplines or specialties have distinct languages. Hence, they
must rst develop a pidgin language so that they can communicate
across specialty areas. The inclusion of a chapter representing the Con-
tinental tradition in the social sciences is an initial effort to lay out the
parent languages from which such a pidgin can be formed. The remain-
ing chapters tap the consensual themes of researchpopulation;
consumption; land cover and use; institutional actions, culture, and
consequencesin the human dimensions of GEC as well as method-
ological issues relevant to understanding these themes. By reading across
them one learns not only the state of social science thinking on these
issues, but also the conceptual language and alternative approaches
being brought to bear on this complex topic. This is a necessary step in
the essential task of developing the integrated approaches needed to
understand GEC.
Research Traditions and Directions: The Substantive Chapters
Continental social science, not only a dominant perspective in mainland
Europe, but also a major force in parts of the United Kingdom and its
Commonwealth as well as South America and elsewhere, differs from
American social science in its very foundations. The Continental tradi-
tion emphasizes the view that humans are neither passive recipients of
environmental knowledge and options, nor merely objects to be studied
via scientic methods by those interested in human-nature dynamics.
Rather, this tradition notes that values, beliefs, norms, attitudes, and
stories about the environment are all activelyand in many cases, stra-
tegicallyconstructed. As such they become the focus of investigation,
not the objective conditions of nature.
28
This view is one of the
cornerstones of much of the Continental approach and often a source
of tension between the Continental and Anglophone traditions, since it
has implications for epistemology especially. An exemplar of the Conti-
nental tradition is the theorizing of German sociologist Ulrich Beck in
chapter 2.
Risk Worldview
A fundamental characteristic of GEC is the extent to which our under-
standing of the biosphere and related human inuences is fraught with
uncertainty. For more than two decades, uncertainty has been under-
stood as a central feature of all environmental issues. A substantial
literature has emerged to address uncertainty, reconceptualized as risk.
This literature ranges from highly sophisticated toxicology and expo-
sure modeling to sociological studies of risk organizations and psycho-
logical studies of how perceptions of uncertainty are shaped and move
through society. Perhaps the most provocative and inuential line of
argument within this growing literature on risk is the idea that risk itself
has become a major foundation of twenty-rst-century society, displac-
ing to some extent older foundations such as class, social location,
fundamental belief systems, or ethnic identity.
In chapter 2, Ulrich Beck, the major architect of this new risk world-
view, recapitulates and extends in new directions his original risk
society argument (Beck [1986] 1992). He not only distinguishes his
theoretical argument from competing continental perspectives (e.g. cul-
tural theory) but, more important, also provides a conceptual lens to
focus our understanding of fundamental, reinforcing changes in social
structures and human ecosystems. The emergence of PaSS, reecting the
human system part of CHANS, generated a remarkable increase in the
magnitude and scale of risks and their spread around the globe. PaSS
created a world risk society that bifurcates modernity into two dis-
tinct phases: in the rst phase, modernity comprises all the features
characteristic of rational calculus (Jaeger et al. 2001); in the second,
modernity comprises risks and vulnerabilities that elude rational calcu-
lus. Furthermore, Beck articulates the pervasive socialization of nature
and its transformation from an ontological entity into an idealization.
Owing to this idealization ecological debates are no longer about nature
per se, but about competing cultural and political concepts of nature. It
follows, then, that concerns about global environmental change are
unavoidably bound up with a panoply of constructed representations of
nature, facilitated by the media and political actors. Here Beck explains
how global climate change, one of GECs principal systemic changes, is
so bound up.
Population and Consumption
In contrast to the grand sweep of Continental thinking is a research
program devoted to understanding the anthropogenic drivers of GEC.
An advanced and systematically developed line of research, this program,
labeled STIRPAT, focuses on other primary drivers of human impacts
on the environment, especially those of population and consumption
(www.stirpat.org). STIRPAT is a CHANS-focused approach devoted to
the question of why nation-states and other entities differ in their impact
on the environment. With the nation-state as its principal unit of analy-
sis to date, STIRPAT provides a suite of macrondings that should
complement the microndings from the case studies that now dominate
CHANS research (Liu et al. 2007a). STIRPAT research draws on theory
in ecology and social science and on methods in the social sciences, where
macrocomparative analysis is a long-established tradition. But it also
attends to the tradition in the physical and natural sciences of using
relatively simple accounting equations to understand the driving forces
of global change, and deploys emerging measures of human environmen-
tal impact. The resulting research is referred to as Structural Human
Ecology (SHE). In chapter 3, Thomas Dietz, Eugene A. Rosa, and Richard
York, principal STIRPAT architects, review SHEs approaches and theo-
ries and STIRPAT results to date. Their ndings are consistent with
general arguments that are centuries old, but are much more disciplined
and robust, and point to population size and consumption as key factors
resulting in environmental impacts.
Land Use and Land Cover
One of the most important and stimulating challenges of the last decade
of work on human dimensions of global change is nding ways to inte-
grate questions and methods from the social sciences with those of the
physical and biological sciences. A particularly advanced and systemati-
cally developed topic in this line of investigation is research on land-use
and land-cover change.
Changes in how land is used and resulting changes in landscape cover
and ecology are among the most profound of human inuences on
the earth, and are major drivers of climate change, deforestation, bio-
diversity losses, and alteration of biogeochemical cycles. So it is not
surprising that an international program of research on Land Use Cover
and Change (LUCC) was the rst of the systematic human dimensions
programs to emerge. In chapter 4, Emilio F. Moran reviews the progress
in our understanding of land use change over the last decade. He shows
that the cumulative literature on the topic underscores how decisions
concerning the use of land and other resources are nested in the context
of community practices, spatial distributions of populations, state pol-
icies, and international forces. He anticipates a considerable renement
in this literature over the next decade with a deeper understanding of
the structure of landholding, the inuence of tax and insurance regula-
tions, the cost of alternatives for protecting land resources, and effective
management practices.
Institutional Structures and Practices
One culmination of the long, repeated historical process of institution
building is the nation-state. Except for Antarctica, all inhabitable areas
of the globe are dened and ruled by territorially dened states
approximately two hundred in total. Because the nation-state is so
pervasive, it is easy to forget that the idea of the nation-state, now the
universal, large-scale political form, is of relatively recent origin, a
product of modernization. As recently as 1500 AD, only a small frac-
tion (less than 20 percent) of the worlds land area was territorially
bounded into states.
International Environmental Regimes That the nation-state is the prin-
cipal agent of collective decision making leads to one unequivocal chal-
lenge of GEC: global impacts to CHANS do not respect national borders.
For example, air pollution generated by coal-red plants in the Midwest
of the United States does not stop upon reaching the Canadian border,
and nor does air pollution generated in East Asia stop at the Pacic
Ocean but travels freely over water to contribute to air quality problems
on the West Coast of the United States.
This incongruity between the ecological boundaries of GEC and the
political boundaries of collective action doubtless represents one of the
most difcult institutional challenges of GEC. It has led to the increased
importance of international environmental agreements of the sort Oran
R. Young reviews in chapter 5. Here the research is an organized and
systematic effort to understand how institutional regimes, especially at
the international level, come into play and what effect they have. Young
provides an assessment (what he terms a mid-term report) of the
extent to which the creation and growth of international regimes is an
effective response to the challenges of GEC. He concludes with both
hope and caution. Hope lies in the effectiveness of emergent regimes in
mitigating a number of GEC problems. Caution lies in the realization
that neither a common model nor a simple recipe is the appropriate
strategy to pursue. Rather, the most effective international environ-
mental regimes will be those that evolve from in-depth understanding of
individual cases.
Common Pool Resources
The research agenda of international institutionalism intersects with a
centuries-old problem concerning the tension between unlimited human
demands and natures nite resources. At least since the writings of clas-
sical economist David Ricardo in the eighteenth century, scholars have
pondered this problem of diminishing returns. In modern times the
question is at the heart of a decades-old research program on the human
governance of common pool resources. This modern version of the
problem was largely stimulated by a germinal article with a provocative
title, The Tragedy of the Commons, in the journal Science (1968). In
this article, biologist Garrett Hardin argued that the solution to the
problem of a growing population pushing against nite resources could
not be found in technical solutions.
A rich tradition of contemporary research, more synthetic than in the
past, has drawn attention to a variety of nuances to the problem and to
a range of solutions that eluded Hardins overly simplistic version (Dietz,
Ostrom, and Stern 2003). Bonnie J. McCay and Svein Jentoft, in chapter
6, label Hardins approach as thin and abstract, resulting in various
tenuous conclusions. They provide a thick or ethnographically rich
alternative that reveals the limitations of Hardins abstractness while
uncovering numerous adaptive institutions that affect the resilience of the
environment. They show that local and regional resources around the
globe are threatened by cumulative environmental changechange that
is governed at least in part by local behavior, but is also inuenced by
globalization. With this foundation McCay and Jentoft go on to review
our substantial knowledge of commons and do so in a way that respects
both the Anglophone and Continental traditions of scholarship.
Ecological Consequences: Vulnerability
Scholars have become increasingly aware of at least one lesson of
historythat CHANS in many circumstances are particularly vulnerable
to environmental change (Kasperson, Kasperson, and Turner 1995;
Gunderson and Holling 2002; Turner, Kasperson et al. 2003; Turner,
Matson et al. 2003). Indeed, many past societies did not ease into stages
of ecological insustainability, but experienced abrupt collapse (Diamond
2005). This recognition has produced a spontaneous tradition of research
that engages both the Continental and American social scientic tradi-
tions and focuses on the comparative vulnerability of societies around
the world. The critical importance of determining the types, locus, and
scale of human vulnerability to environmental change has led to increased
efforts to coordinate and promote this research. Chapter 7, by Jean X.
Kasperson, Roger E. Kasperson, and B. L. Turner II, provides an over-
view of the theoretical underpinnings and the state of the science in this
rapidly changing and very critical area.
But more important, the idea of vulnerability explored by Kasperson,
Kasperson, and Turner provides the dynamic link between times cycles
and times arrow in CHANS. The ecological cycles of societies lacking
the resilience to overcome the stresses of vulnerability are prone to
criticality, a level of endangerment whereby times arrow overwhelms
natures regenerative cycles (Kasperson, Kasperson, and Turner 1995).
This crucial point is summarized by Kasperson, Kasperson, and Turner:
Criticality is a function of the speed and intensity of environmental
degradation, the vulnerability of people and ecosystems affected, and
coping capacities and resilience . . . environmental criticality emerges his-
torically through a series of stages in which the decisive attributes are
the regenerative capacities of affected ecosystems and the buffering and
mitigative costs incurred by affected societies.
In sum, the concept vulnerability provides a basis not only for ear-
marking threatened ecosystems but also for understanding the unsustain-
able transformation of CHANS globallyMega-CHANS.
What Lies Ahead?
The elaboration of the pivotal issues we have outlined lies in the chap-
ters that follow. In them, the authors provide a state-of-the-art assess-
ment of how far human dimensions research has come in the past
several decades. They also map out the most promising paths to take
toward a fuller understanding of the complex challenges of coupled
human and natural systems in the context of global environmental
change.
Acknowledgments
This chapter was improved considerably by the comments of Lauren
Richter, Christopher Dick, Shushanik Makaryan, Kennon Kuykendall,
and Mick Wilks.
Notes
1. The ecological communities surrounding deep ocean geothermal vents
smokersand deep underground microbial communities may be the excep-
tions that prove the rule.
2. GEC92 is often referred to as the Rainbow Book in the human dimensions
community because of its multicolored dust jacket.
3. We follow GEC92 in referring to key aspects of human action as proximate
human drivers or proximate anthropogenic drivers. The Millennium Ecosys-
tem Assessment (UNEP 2005a; Alcalmo et al. 2003) refers to these factors as
indirect drivers while using the term direct drivers to refer to factors such as
land-use change, species introduction, and use of technology. In the MEA, direct
drivers are dened as factors that unequivocally inuence ecosystems and
include climate variability and change, plant nutrient use, land conversion, and
biological invasions and diseases. The GEC92 and the MEA frameworks are
internally consistent but care must be taken in moving across them to avoid
confusion of terms.
4. The term biosphere is generally associated with Russian geologist Vladimir
Ivanovich Vernadsky ([1924] 1998) from the title of his book The Biosphere.
5. In adopting the terms times arrow and times cycles, we mimic Stephen Jay
Goulds (1987) phrasing and framing of history in long glances.
6. Origination of the phrase arrow of time rests with physicist Sir Arthur
Eddington who, holding the second law of thermodynamics to be supreme,
pointed to it as the only unassailable indicator of evolution of the physical world
(Eddington [1935] 1958).
7. In this regard, global environmental research is like astronomy or many of
the social sciences where the theory-to-experiment-to-theory cycle that exempli-
es scientic research cannot be applied because it is not possible to conduct
controlled experiments on the key phenomena being studied.
8. For example, Homo erectus used re at least four hundred thousand
years ago, long before the appearance of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens
(Gouldsblom 1992).
9. More extensive analysis of such linkages can be found in Costanza,
Graumlich, and Steffen (2007).
10. Roughly at the end of the Pleistocene Era.
11. Rome had its share of other environmental problems due to its growing
population and rising standard of living. Demand increased for timberas build-
ing material, fuel for cooking, energy for industrial purposes, and heat source
for private and public buildings. Farmers eagerly cut trees for timber to meet
this demand, thereby accelerating deforestation while increasing arable land
available for cropping (Gouldsblom 1992). Adding to Romes environmental
problems was its considerable air pollution traceable to chariot trafc on the
citys dusty streets and to the smoke from the funeral pyres on the outskirts of
the city. Tainter and Crumley (2007) discuss how the dynamics of the Roman
Empire were driven in part by climate change, so the feedback between the
Empire and the natural environment ran in both directions.
12. Landsat assessments in 2003 showed that 90 percent of the Mesopotamian
marshlands have disappeared (UNEP 2003). A United Nations Environment
Programme project, funded by the government of Japan, reooded the marsh-
lands resulting in a 40 percent recovery of the marshlands in just two years
(UNEP 2005b).
13. Archaeological records are essential to understanding the impacts of past
societies and civilizations on ecosystems because they often cover a sufcient
amount of time to provide a basis for differentiating human impacts from
impacts due to natural cycles.
14. Note that while the human-carrying capacity of the planet is difcult to
dene and estimate, the human population has already exceeded a third of all
estimates of carrying capacity ever developed (Cohen 1995).
15. There are numerous examples where societies and civilizations (Easter Island
is the paradigmatic example) have overshot their ecological limits in the past,
resulting in their own demise. What is different in Cattons framework is his
analysis of ecological exploitation at a global scale.
16. Crutzen shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and
Sherwood Rowland for basic discoveries of the effects of chlorouorocarbons
(CFCs) on the earths ozone layer.
17. The entire Holocene (Recent Whole) era, consisting of the last twelve thou-
sand years or so, is sometimes labeled as the Anthropocene (meaning recent
Homo sapiens sapiens) to reect, somewhat incorrectly, the emergence, survival,
and dispersal of humans around the globe. Actually humans had evolved and
dispersed all over the world prior to twelve thousand years ago. Furthermore,
ecological disasters up to three centuries ago tended to be isolated and localized,
not a threat across the globe.
18. While there is widespread agreement over the idea of globalization, there is
considerable debate on when the process of globalization began. Held et al.
(1999) identify three schools of thought pursuing the idea: hyperglobalization,
skeptics, and transformationalists. Hyperglobalizers view globalization as the
signature of an entirely new, unprecedented era where far-reaching transforma-
tions around the world are rendering the institutions and culture of modernism
obsolete. Skeptics, observing similar patterns in the not-too-distant history, draw
a much different conclusion and argue that not much is changing. Transforma-
tionalists view globalization as the eforescence of a slow, long-term historical
process. An even more far-reaching transformationalist view is that of world-
systems theory (WST), which sees globalization as the extension of processes that
had their origins in the sixteenth century (Wallerstein 2004). Yearley (2007)
discusses the links between globalization and global environmental change,
although he addresses neither the distinctions among theories of globalization
offered by Held et al. (1999) nor the widely accepted conceptualization of global
environmental change developed by Turner et al. (1990). Gallagher (2009) pro-
vides an excellent review of the conceptual links between globalization and
environmental change, and reviews the evidence for the major claims.
19. Vitousek et al. (1997, 498) summarize their estimates of global human
impacts this way: The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occur-
ring now are fundamentally different from those at any other time in history:
we are changing the Earth more rapidly than we are understanding it.
20. Hibbard et al. (2007) provide further evidence of these recent rapid changes.
21. The beginning of The Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000).
22. This seemingly low value may appear innocuous, but it is anything but. This
is precisely the average surface temperature of the globe that brackets the climate
of the ice ages and the warm interglacial periods.
23. The problem is exacerbated in parts of the world that follow shifting culti-
vation practices, such as slash-and-burn agriculture. With increasing population
pressure and with increased demand for raw materials, fallow periods are cut
short, thereby reducing the replenishment of the soil and accelerating the rate of
soil erosion.
24. The impacts of urbanization on deforestation are not uniform throughout
the world. In Africa, for example, deforestation appears to be driven as much
by rural population growth as by urbanization (Bawa and Dayanandan 1997).
25. In 2000 the 3M company, maker of Scotchgard, phased out the PFOS-based
version of the product and substituted a formula free of PFOSs.
26. Expected to be overtaken by India in the next several years.
27. In particular, a desktop computer with a seventeen-inch CRT monitor
requires at least 530 pounds of fossil fuels, fty pounds of chemicals, and 3,330
pounds of water to manufacture. The amount of materials required for its
manufacture equals roughly the weight of a sports utility vehicle (Kuehr and
Williams 2003).
28. For continental theorists, noting that no place on earth is without a human
footprint, the term natural no longer means a passive, pristine environment.
There are no natural environments, only socialized ones.
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